Thursday, September 01, 2016

The bull market in stocks may be aging, but likely has much more time to run—just don’t look for investors to jump for joy about it, said billionaire investor Ken Fisher.

“I think this is going to be the longest bull market in history and, arguably, the most joyless,” the founder and chief executive of Camas, Wash.-based Fisher Investments said in an interview with MarketWatch on Tuesday.

The current bull market dates to March 9, 2009 and is the second-longest on record, behind the 13-year bull market spanning from 1987 to 2000.

That lack of mirth and the bull’s longevity go hand in hand. Fisher is fond of citing legendary investor John Templeton’s maxim that bull markets are “born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.”

Euphoria remains in short supply, with investors moving from one worry to another, Fisher said. China and Brexit had investors bracing for the worst earlier in the year. Indeed, pessimism—the view that stocks will fall over the next six months—rose to a two-month high of 33.4% in the most recent AAII Sentiment Survey, while bullish sentiment was at 29.4%, and has hovered below the historical average of 38.5% for most of the past year and a half.